When it was time to pick a quotation for my graduate student profile for the Virginia Tech sociology department webpage (https://liberalarts.vt.edu/departments-and-schools/department-of-sociology/sociology-graduate-students/Steven-McGlamery.html), I chose the following:
"[Slavery] has been called by a great many names, and it will call itself by yet another name; ... [we] had better wait and see what new form this old monster will assume, in what new skin this old snake will come forth next." --Frederick Douglass, May 1865
I had kind of assumed that this idea had been expressed some time later than in the immediate aftermath of emancipation--you know, how colonialism morphed into neocolonialism, slavery became convict labor and sharecropping, followed by ghettoization, segregation, mass incarceration (the "New Jim Crow" says Dr. Alexander), return to voter suppression, police intimidation and violence, etc.
I should have known that the white power structure, including academia, had once again marginalized and disregarded an important, prophetic voice of color.
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